Beauvoir in Time Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger volume 348 Philosophy, Literature, and Politics Edited by J.D. Mininger ( lcc International University ) The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs and brill.com/plp Beauvoir in Time By Meryl Altman leiden | boston This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. More information about the initiative can be found at www. knowledgeunlatched.org. Cover illustration: Simone de Beauvoir in Beijing 1955. Photograph under CC0 1.0 license. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020023509 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 isbn 978-90-04-43120-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-43121-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Meryl Altman. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. 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Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Before We Said “We” 1 1 Unhappy Bodies: The Frigid Woman in The Second Sex 15 1 A Passion for Frigidity? 19 2 Who Was Wilhelm Stekel? 22 3 Stekel (and Freud) in The Second Sex 25 4 Stekel par lui-même 35 5 What She Made of What He Made of Us 40 6 The Trouble with Happy 59 7 Misery, Agency, Ethics 66 8 Therapy and Self-Improvement 77 9 Last Thoughts 82 2 Simone de Beauvoir and Lesbian Lived Experience 84 1 Where the Lesbians Are 88 2 Reading in Time 91 3 The Time of Writing 99 4 Between Gide and Proust 103 5 Lesbian Reading 107 6 Lesbians and L’invitée 112 7 Last Thoughts 114 3 Nothing to Say about Race and Class? 116 1 Beauvoir’s Trip to America, and What She Found There 118 2 Materialist Analysis and Working Women’s Lives in The Second Sex 129 3 Questions of Exclusion, Questions of Method 148 4 “Others” and Analogies: Rereading the Introduction after Anna Julia Cooper 157 5 Imaginary Dialogues: Anna Julia Cooper, Other Black Women Writers 171 6 Spelman in Time: What Got Lost, and What Was Needed 176 7 Different Legacies: From Audre Lorde to Judith Butler 195 8 Beauvoir’s Other “Others”: Nation, Class, Colonialism 199 vi Contents 9 Beauvoir’s Early Political Thinking and Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté 206 10 Last Thoughts 235 4 Beauvoir and Blackness 237 1 Two-Way Streets: Richard Wright, Psychology, and Politics 237 2 Lost in Translation 242 3 Violence and Authenticity 250 4 Surrealism's Paradoxical Legacy 257 5 Surrealism and Politics: More Two-Way Streets 264 6 Who Was Michel Leiris? 273 7 Beauvoir and Surrealism: L’invitée (Again) 279 8 Myths and Travels 294 9 Meanwhile, Back in New York... 300 10 Beauvoir Reads America, America Reads Beauvoir 308 11 Reading Beauvoir with Fanon 320 12 Unflattering Portraits, New Ways to Live 337 5 The East Is Real: Orientalism and Its Enemies 347 1 Algeria without Apology 347 2 A Response to “Occidental Dreams” 364 3 Harem Trouble 375 4 Theories and Histories 387 5 The Myth Itself, and Not the Thing 394 6 Anti-orientalism in The Second Sex : Plus Jamais Claudel 407 7 Pour en finir avec Montherlant 421 8 But We Know So Much More about This Now 426 9 Harem Trouble 2.0: The Veil 432 10 One Last Imaginary Dialogue, and A Few Real Ones 448 11 Last Thoughts 462 6 Beauvoir in China 464 1 An Essay on China 464 2 Reality-Testing and Cold War Frames 477 3 Orientalisms, Anti-orientalisms, Alternatives 483 4 Last Thoughts: Dateline Beijing 494 Bibliography 501 Index 542 Acknowledgements This book has been so long in the making that I’ve mentally revised the ac- knowledgments many times, as blocking figures became helping figures and vice versa. It would be impossible to thank everyone properly, and an account of the project’s vicissitudes would be dull. I am certain that Beauvoir in Time could not have been completed without the intellectual and moral support of Sonia Kruks, Keith Nightenhelser, and Deborah Cameron. I am happy to acknowledge the generous and sustained assistance I’ve re- ceived from DePauw University’s Faculty Development Program, which sup- ported sabbatical leaves and crucial conference travel, and to express my grati- tude for the skilled and helpful staff at DePauw’s Roy O. West Library. Thanks are also due to several decades of Feminist Theory students who have worked through The Second Sex , and some other heavy books, with me, year after year. I am grateful also for the opportunity to spend winter and spring 2014 as a Visit- ing Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, and for the warm hospitality I was offered there by the Principal, Baroness Helena Kennedy, and by Ros Ballaster, Lucinda Rumsey, Kathryn Gleadle, Michè le Mendelssohn, and Dana Mills, among others. Digging further back, this project owes a great deal to French teachers, espe- cially Miss Ten Eyck at Croton-Harmon High School and then George Moskos at Swarthmore College. George and my other Swarthmore professors (Phil Weinstein, Craig Williamson, John Hinchey, Bob Roza, Lucy McDiarmid) passed on to us a training in close reading and literary history and theory that I’ve used constantly since, while encouraging us to pursue our own indepen- dent lines of thinking wherever these might lead, without regard to orthodox- ies or disciplinary boundaries. I cannot imagine who I would be if I’d gone to college anywhere else. Chapter 4 shows a particular debt to my American Studies coursework with Ann Douglas and Sacvan Bercovitch at Columbia University. The influence of seminars jointly taught there by Nancy Miller and Carolyn Heilbrun, and the intellectual community of graduate students that emerged from those classes, is visible throughout my work. Mary Dearborn and Julie Abraham have been indispensable interlocutors, then and long afterwards. I’m grateful also to two groups that met “off the grid” in those years, filling in the gaps in my formal edu- cation. The first was a graduate student work-in-progress group, mostly histori- ans, including Annelise Orleck, Nancy Robertson, Susan Yohn, Barbara Balliet, and Claire Potter, that met at NYU. The other group, which began as the plan- ning committee for “The Scholar and the Feminist Conference IX: Feminist viii Acknowledgements Politics of Sexuality” at Barnard College (1981), was led by Carole Vance and in- cluded Ann Snitow, Kate Ellis, Ellen Willis, Ellen DuBois, Francis Doughty, Am- ber Hollibaugh, and Esther Newton. From these women, and especially from Carole, I learned much of what I know about feminist activism, theory, and his- tory. I learned especially to look for, and value, complexity: to listen for all the parts of the story, to remember that there is always more than one story to tell. More recently, as I’ve branched out from literary study to engage increas- ingly with philosophical topics, I’ve been grateful for the welcome and the guidance I’ve found through FEAST (Feminist Ethics and Social Theory), the IAPh (International Association of Women Philosophers), and the Austral- asian Society for Continental Philosophy. Gaile Polhaus, Richard Lynch, Laura Werner, Lorraine Code, Margaret Simons, and Marguerite LaCaze have at dif- ferent times provided particularly meaningful help. Keith Nightenhelser has been a peerless philosophical cicerone and intellectual companion. Finally, the conferences of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society have been frequent, friendly opportunities to share work and to hear the latest develop- ments in Beauvoir scholarship, both from established scholars in the field and younger researchers who bring new ideas and new energy to the work. I am grateful especially to Margaret Simons, Tove Pettersen, and Jennifer McWeeny for their tireless work to sustain the shared project of Beauvoir studies. ... Specific chapters incur particular debts. Portions of chapter one appeared as “La Femme Frigide dans Le deuxième sexe ” in Le Cinquantenaire du deuxième Sexe , ed. Sylvie Chaperon, Paris, Syllepse, 2002. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Simone de Beauvoir and Lesbian Lived Experience,” Feminist Studies 33.1, Spring 2007. Some passages from Chapter 4 appeared in my 2013 article, “Was Surrealism a Humanism? The Case of Michel Leiris,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature , 67:1. All this material is reprinted by permission. A conversation with Didier Eribon at the Future of the Queer Past conference (Chicago, September 2000) was crucial to the development of Chapter 2. Sara Lennox encouraged me to write a conference paper, “Beauvoir and Blackness,” for a 2006 conference in Berlin sponsored by BEST, “Black European Studies in Transnational Perspective,” which became the germ for what is now Chapters 3 and 4. I am profoundly grateful for Sara’s invitation, and for the example of her work with BEST; the opportunity to learn from their work was a serendipitous turning point. I’m grateful also to the Midwestern Society for Women in Phi- losophy (M-SWIP), for their generous hospitality to me as a non-philosopher at ix Acknowledgements the East Lansing meeting in 2007 where I shared the next version of that paper, and to Gaile Polhaus for inviting me to bring that version to M-SWIP’s panel at the 2008 Chicago APA. The Diverse Lineages of Existentialism conference (St. Louis, June 2014) was another turning point; thanks are due to Margaret Simons, Lewis Gordon, and Jane Anna Gordon for organizing the wonderful meetings, and to other pre- senters there who are specifically acknowledged in Chapter 3. Kate Conley en- couraged my work on Michel Leiris by inviting me to contribute to a cluster on Surrealism, Ethnography, and the Animal-Human she was editing for Sympo- sium , and was kind enough to put her deep knowledge of surrealist movements at my disposal as I worked on Chapter 4. Portions of Chapter 6 were first presented at a Young Historians’ Workshop, “Are Differences Ineffable? Diversity, Hybridity and Current Issues in History Writing,” Renmin University, Beijing, October 2016. I gratefully acknowledge Professor Chen Hao, Professor Hou Chen, and their colleagues at RenDa for their gracious hospitality and understanding, and also thank the Asian Studies Program at DePauw University for funding my travel to Beijing. I owe thanks as well to the East-West Center in Honolulu, especially Shana Brown and Peter Herschock, for a period of summer study during which I developed the paper, and to the Mellon Foundation which funded that study through a joint grant to Wabash College and DePauw. For the final sections of Chapter 6, many thanks are due to Sharon Wesoky of Allegheny College, with whom I am engaged in a study project on teaching about China in U.S. feminist theory courses, and to the Great Lakes College Association for funding our collaboration. ... Finally, I thank Michè le Le Doeuff, Sonia Kruks, and Toril Moi, the three Beau- voir scholars whose writing has meant the most to mine, not least for their demonstration that it is possible for arguments to be both rigorous and read- able. Their suggestion that my view of Beauvoir was not crazy, that I had some- thing valuable to say, made it possible to go on. Among many wise things in Hipparchia ’ s Choice , Michè le Le Doeuff says this: “it is better to allow yourself to start speaking before being completely sure that you can justify what you say; otherwise, you will never speak at all” (221). And Toril Moi, explaining why her first book on Beauvoir, which she calls a “genealogy,” has no formal conclu- sion, writes: Since there is no obvious end to the textual network explored by the genealogical project...a genealogist’s work is never done...[L]ike the x Acknowledgements housewife, the genealogist stops her work for fairly pragmatic reasons: the floor is clean enough; it is time to start cooking instead; it is too late and one is too tired to continue... (30) Permission to begin; permission to go on; permission to stop, at least for now. Thank you. Introduction Before We Said “We” Have you ever noticed, people can’t speak about Simone de Beauvoir without giving dates and mentioning ages? It’s because she was always obsessed with real time. geneviève brisac1 In teaching Beauvoir, the task is to help students read her historically without dismissing her as “dated.” deborah nelson2 In rapidly changing societies all generations are transitional. wini breines3 In the US, in Great Britain and Australia, in France itself, The Second Sex mat- tered enormously at the outset of second-wave feminism. In memoir after memoir from the 1960s and 1970s, we read that this one book changed women’s lives: led them to withdraw their energies from the male-dominated left and invent consciousness-raising, to leave their husbands and abandon what Adri- enne Rich called “the old way of marriage,”4 to see their culture, their families, their own bodies in new and challenging ways. Many of us who teach women’s studies today acknowledge this by assigning the book, or at least some care- fully selected parts of it. Kate Millett: “Betty [Friedan] wasn’t the mother of us all. Simone de Beauvoir was.” Our Bodies, Ourselves : “ The Second Sex was the 1 “On ne peut pas parler de Simone de Beauvoir sans donner des dates, sans citer des âges, l’avez-vous remarqué? C’est qu’elle fut toujours obsédée du temps réel” (Brisac, “Beauvoir ‘en temps réel’: une écriture de l’instantané,” 58). Except where noted, all translations are my own. 2 Midwest Faculty Seminar on Simone de Beauvoir, University of Chicago, November 21–23, 1996. 3 Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties , 24. 4 Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” 43. For accounts of the effects The Sec- ond Sex had on the marriages of two otherwise very different women, see Angie Pegg in Penny Forster and Imogen Sutton, Daughters of de Beauvoir , 53–65, and Marge Piercy, Sleep- ing With Cats: A Memoir , 118. © Meryl Altman, 2020 | doi 10.1163/9789004431218_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Introduction 2 first book many of us read that made us aware we were oppressed as females.” Michèle Le Dœuff: “ The Second Sex was the movement before the movement.”5 But which Second Sex were they reading? For years I owned two editions of H.M. Parshley’s English version. One was a large-format work of serious phi- losophy, undecorated except for some tasteful stripes, intended to be read at a library table: this is the text that functioned in my undergraduate Feminist Theory seminar to signify that women’s studies was a scholarly rigorous under- taking, not some flaky fad.6 The other copy is a drugstore paperback. Its cover shows a crouching naked lady emerging from a vague and lurid yellowish haze. Blurbs emphasize its daring and titillating content, marking and marketing it as a Book About Sex: [T]he most penetrating, frank, and intimate book ever written about Woman.... [A] Frenchwoman, who never loses sight of the needs and de- sires of both sexes, has used her artistry and erudition to explore woman in each of her many dimensions. Her ... highly original and stimulating conclusions have produced a book that overwhelmed reviewers....7 This change in presentation, from scandalous trash to ponderous tome, was a tribute to scholars and activists who worked to get Beauvoir taken seriously as a philosopher and thinker. And it is also a tribute to feminist advances, in and out of the academy, more generally: an intellectual woman, writing about women, is no longer exotic, risqué, miraculous, faintly terrifying. We tend now to see that early edition as a sexist misunderstanding, a joke in rather bad taste. But paradoxically, it was the earlier, trashier, version that inspired second-wave feminists. The yellow one, the “dirty” one, was the one they read.8 Readers from that time often mention The Second Sex alongside other books—Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar , Mary McCarthy’s The Group , especially Do- ris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook— novels which sold very widely in the early 1960s, and which share a paradoxical transitional status. These books kicked 5 Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women, 60; Mi- chèle Le Dœuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. , 57. See also now Miriam David, Feminism, Gender and Universities: Politics, Passion, and Pedagogies , 103, 106, 111, 112, 116, 128, 130, 132, and 141. 6 Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. Parshley (1989). 7 Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. Parshley (1965). 8 The French, obviously, were reading it in French. But as Judith Coffin shows in a very interest- ing article, “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,” even in France The Second Sex was often read and reviewed alongside Kinsey’s contemporaneous work, and was understood similarly to be a work dealing primarily with sexual matters. 3 Before We Said “We” something loose for large numbers of women readers who were, or were about to become, feminists. All relied on newly frank (and painful) discussions of sexuality and emotional attachment; each also tended to foreground Politics with a capital P (in particular, the Cold War); but the personal and the political plots were split, opposed, not yet part of the same analysis, the same conversa- tion. None of the novels can fairly be described as feminist. As Anna Wulf, the central character of The Golden Notebook , might say, I wouldn’t write that now. (In fact, Lessing and McCarthy both explicitly and angrily disavowed any con- nection with the feminist movement when it re-emerged and attempted to claim them.) These novels speak from the social and psychological place that was Beauvoir’s when she wrote, in the introduction to The Second Sex , “women do not say ‘we.’”9 Soon, women would say “we,” would recognize that even the most intimate pain of living as a woman under patriarchy was, in Adrienne Rich’s phrase, “shared, unnecessary, and political.”10 Those who came of age politically in the 1970s would draw on existentialist language and energy to mobilize for repro- ductive freedom, equal pay, sexual self-determination, and a thousand other things. Beauvoir herself would move beyond the hope she expressed at the end of The Second Sex and participate in direct collective action, to the point where she insisted on being pictured on the cover of L’arc only as one member of her group: already a visible and committed woman of the left, she became a force for feminism.11 But not long after this the problem of not saying “we” was replaced by an awareness of the dangers of saying “we” too quickly, as in, “what do you mean we , white woman?” And in the United States, at least, The Second Sex soon be- came a target, accused of a myopic lack of inclusivity that was said to charac- terize the “second wave.” In 1988, Elizabeth Spelman’s highly influential Ines- sential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought took an attack on Beauvoir as its starting point, drawing and quartering her for precisely the as- sertion she had been unwilling, or unable, to make. 9 “Les femmes ... ne disent pas ‘nous’” (Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe [hereinafter DS ], 1:19). All references are to the French edition. As a general rule, I will refer to Beauvoir’s works un- der their French titles, not least because the English titles by which they are known are often approximations. The exception is The Second Sex , which in the interests of consis- tency will be called throughout by its English title. (So much of my discussion deals with its reception by Anglophone readers that either way would have been awkward, and this way seemed less fussy.) 10 Rich, “Translations,” in Diving Into the Wreck , 41. 11 Annie Sugier and Kahina Benziane, “Nos chemins se sont croisés,” 329. Introduction 4 So the reception of The Second Sex has been caught between two paradoxes. First, how could a mass movement have been started by a book which barely sketches the possibility of collective action? And then, what are we to do with a book that does not speak of differences between women in the ways identity politics came to demand, but that nonetheless appears to have spoken to wom- en of color around the world, from Lorraine Hansberry to Sara Ahmed, in a powerful way? The relation between “I” and “we”—epistemological, ethical, political, practical—has proved one of feminist theory’s stubbornest knots. For sound and healthy reasons, both pronouns often feel uncomfortable in our mouths, often sound poisoned in our ears. Yet for strong and healthy reasons, I/we con- tinue to use and need them. This isn’t (just) an academic issue. Whenever I hear (or say) a sentence like “am I a feminist?” “am I still a feminist if?” “is feminism still about me?” “is feminism about me yet?” “is there a group I can join?” even, “isn’t there anything we can do about [whatever awful thing has happened that day]?” the same problem is being posed. Because I’m still hop- ing the answer to all those questions is “yes,” for me and my students among others, I want to bracket the forms this issue has taken for the last three de- cades or so, and go back behind and before “we” (and I) got into such a mess. Even as we pursue the project of exegesis and analysis of Beauvoir as a bril- liant and multifaceted theoretical thinker, a major philosopher of the twenti- eth century, I think we should pay attention to what women saw in the yellow- ish, and yellowing, version, the one they hid in their laundry baskets alongside The Golden Notebook .12 Taking her philosophical arguments seriously requires us to read them alongside the (then) more popular and (now) more suspect discourses with which readers sometimes confused them, and from which they often grew: “trashy” sex manuals, bad novels with romance plots, outmod- ed psychoanalytic and sexological authorities, “human rights” talk, and—last but not least—existentialism. I think those first readers saw something more recent theorists, especially philosophers, have missed, or dismissed, or been embarrassed to mention: an energetic, passionate critique of the sorry state of most women’s sexual and romantic lives, and an argument that women’s op- pression could be, should be, taken just as seriously as other ongoing strug- gles for liberation. The biggest mistake we can make as readers, I think, is to try and purge Beauvoir and other postwar women writers of the marks of such prefeminist or even antifeminist discourses that were in her temporal 12 See for instance Elayne Rapping, The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women’s Lives , 4. 5 Before We Said “We” neighborhood, things she said that “we wouldn’t say now.”13 Instead, mapping their search among the languages available to them can help us find our way in ours. In what follows, I’ve concentrated on three recurring aspects of Simone de Beauvoir’s thought—bad sex, lesbians, and “race and class”—which have in recent years been considered embarrassingly “of her era,” and which remain underdiscussed despite the current renaissance of serious scholarship on Beauvoir.14 Looking carefully at the parts of The Second Sex many readers skim or skip, and also at her other essays and autobiographical works, I provide a set of intensive, interdisciplinary readings that locate her writing in her own time and place, neither to accuse nor to excuse, but to clarify: to understand what she was doing then , hoping to show how she is still “good to think with” now My aim is not to defend at all costs everything Beauvoir ever said or did, but to enable readers to agree or disagree with her in a non-anachronistic way by see- ing what larger conversation her texts were part of, what key terms have changed their meaning, whom she was arguing with, what she could or could not have known. This requires a method that will strike some readers as digres- sive, involving long excursions into (for instance) the arcana of early psycho- analysis and the politics of decolonization. But I am ultimately less interested in where her ideas came from than in where they went and might still go. ... This is a very good time to be working on Simone de Beauvoir. For one thing, after decades of lobbying by scholars dissatisfied with Parshley’s unsig- nalled cuts and distortions, I can now finally add a third English version to the two copies of The Second Sex on my shelf.15 The new translation—imperfect, but complete—joins the ongoing efforts of the University of Illinois Press’s 13 Indeed, the parts of the book that speak most powerfully to students today are not always the parts that we foreground in trying to push them to think about it as theory—which is why students who are assigned to read only the introduction, or only excerpts from it, are in my view missing out. 14 There are certainly other aspects equally worthy of similar excavation: in particular, her take on “the data of biology.” 15 Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Per- haps my work will be especially helpful for Anglophone readers who encountered Beau- voir first, or only, in Parshley’s translation: the Beauvoir I discuss here may not be the “Beauvoir” such readers know. For explanation of why a new translation was sorely need- ed, see Margaret Simons, “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex ,” and Toril Moi, “While We Wait: The English Translation of The Sec- ond Sex. ” The new version has not been uncontroversial: see Moi, “The Adulteress Wife,” Introduction 6 Beauvoir Series to make all of what Beauvoir actually said available to Anglo- phone scholars, students, and general readers. Another good sign is the prolif- eration of conferences in the United States and across Europe, plus many new anthologies that take her seriously as a thinker and a feminist theorist and also as a writer of fiction and autobiography.16 Googling the new translation on Amazon shortly after it appeared, I found the number one comment came from a male undergraduate, who gave it five stars, explaining: “It did what was necessary to my head.” It seems safe to point to a broad, interdisciplinary com- munity of both academic and general readers for whom The Second Sex is far from a dead letter. One could not always assume this. Activists and polemicist feminists of the 1970s frequently built on and borrowed from Beauvoir, albeit selectively and often without attribution (as writers as different as Kate Millett and Christine Delphy have since acknowledged).17 But Beauvoir’s reputation was particularly ill-served, both in France and the United States, by feminist theorists in the 1980s, who while continuing to appropriate her insights, also used her as a kind of transference fetish—idealized icon and/or punching bag—rather than re- sponding to what she actually wrote. Pioneering correctives to this view were provided in France by the feminist philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff in 1989 and in the United States by Margaret Simons, through her own essays (collected in 1999)18 and her work as an anthologist, editor of the Beauvoir Series, and gen- eral inspiration. Further excellent work by the late Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Karen Vintges, Sonia Kruks, Toril Moi, and others has now cleared the ground of sexist dismissals, and of Beauvoir’s own evasion of the title “philosopher,” and has done a great deal to rescue her work from the contradictory sets of misreadings that have dogged it: assertions for example that The Second Sex is both too essentialist, and insufficiently attentive to important differences and Nancy Bauer in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews . My own more positive view ap- peared in the Women’s Review of Books 16 See Margaret Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir ; Elizabeth Fal- laize, ed., Beauvoir: A Critical Reader ; Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon, ed., Le Cinquantenaire du deuxième Sexe ; Claudia Card, ed., Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir ; Emily Grosholz, The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir ; Simons, ed., The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir ; Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh, ed., Beauvoir’s Political Think- ing: Critical Essays ; Thomas Staudter, ed., Beauvoir cent ans après sa naissance: contribu- tions interdisciplinaires de cinq continents ; Kristeva et al., eds., (Re)découvrir l’œuvre de Simone de Beauvoir . Of these, the Chaperon and Kristeva volumes are particularly mas- sive, international, and varied. See also now Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold, ed., Blackwell’s Companion to Simone de Beauvoir 17 Forster and Sutton, Daughters of de Beauvoir , 22–23. 18 Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism 7 Before We Said “We” between women and men, too connected to or too disconnected from “the body,” too French or not “French” enough, and so forth. I’m enormously grate- ful for the detailed, lucid work of an international group of women who have taken up the task of understanding Beauvoir’s intellectual work as a whole and its relationship to wider traditions of philosophic thought.19 Thanks to these scholars, I can assume Beauvoir was a serious, careful, origi- nal thinker, motivated by deep and clear feminist commitments, and move on from there. In particular, it is no longer necessary to defend Beauvoir against the idea that she was simply Sartre’s over-devoted acolyte, her work ruined by the influence of an apolitical, sexist, outdated philosophical system, her femi- nism vitiated by a life as his devoted slave (or as a kind of grass widow).20 The question, “should The Second Sex ‘count’ as original philosophy?” has been suf- ficiently answered in the affirmative that it has also been helpfully reopened: yes, she was a philosopher, but what sort of philosophy is this, and what else was she also doing? Nancy Bauer’s characterization of Beauvoir’s philosophic method is suggestive: “For her, the test of whether a philosopher’s work is wor- thy of appropriation is not whether it is susceptible to correction but whether it provides one with a philosophical idiom , a set of terms and concepts that open up a way to do one’s own philosophical work.”21 I follow Bauer in pro- posing that we read Beauvoir herself in precisely that way, but with the addi- tion that not all the idioms she “appropriated” are philosophical—the book’s 19 See especially Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir ; Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir: Gender and Testimony ; Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Mak- ing of an Intellectual Woman and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays ; Nancy Bauer, Sim- one de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism ; Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir ; Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics and Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity . Lori Marso, Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter , is a welcome ad- dition to this group, although it was published too recently to fully inform my study. 20 This last idea particularly informed Deirdre Bair’s 1991 biography. (The phrase “grass wid- ow” is Karen Vintges’s summary of Bair’s view.) Now available are a range of other inter- pretations, including that her ideas were radically different from his, and better, but that she never explicitly signaled this (Le Dœuff); that she invented “Sartrean” existentialism, and he stole it (Fullbrook and Fullbrook); that she influenced his turn to the social after the war, although he never quite credited her properly (Kruks); that other philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, Hegel) were actually more important influences on her work than Sartre was (Heinämaa). All these views seem to me plausible and interesting; it is not my project here to choose among them, and I will be discussing Sartre only in so far as a contrast with his position clarifies Beauvoir’s. 21 Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism, 83. Introduction 8 “mixed diction” is to my mind one of its strengths. In a way, what I want is to recover the true and fruitful weirdness of her work. Twenty-five years ago, I began asking students to read the whole of The Sec- ond Sex , in part because of its historical importance, but also because it seemed refreshingly free of that era’s paralyzing impasses (the question of feminine language, “difference” vs “equality,” difficulties with the category “woman” and “women,” etc.) and more directly connected to the students’ lived realities, to the questions they were asking themselves about sex, work, and life. My hope was that taking another look at Beauvoir could provide what scholars of Amer- ican literature sometimes refer to as a “usable past.” That view has been con- firmed by several prominent scholars, who have seen in Beauvoir’s concept of woman’s “situation” a healthy alternative to what Judith Butler called in 1990 “the circular ruins of contemporary debate.”22 Literary theorist Toril Moi ar- gues that Beauvoir avoided the “iatrogenic” problems of later feminist “theore- ticism,” because she offered neither a feminism of equality nor a feminism of difference but a feminism of freedom; was neither wholly determinist nor wholly voluntarist with respect to “the body”; and took no interest whatever in the problematic distinction between sex and gender: she managed without it. Moi shows that in order to use her for our time, we need to first remember that she is not of our time: Because contemporary English-language critics have read Beauvoir’s 1949 essay through the lens of the 1960s sex/gender distinction, they have failed to see that her essay provides exactly the kind of non-essentialist, concrete, historical and social understanding of the body that so many contemporary feminists are looking for.... If many feminist critiques of Beauvoir strike me as fundamentally flawed ... it is not so much because they misread Beauvoir’s position on difference (though some do), as be- cause they utterly fail to grasp that Beauvoir’s political project is radically different from their own.23 Sonia Kruks makes a related, convincing claim that existentialist and phenom- enological approaches, including Beauvoir’s, can bring back what was lost in subsequent “postmodern” and post-structuralist theory: crucial concepts of freedom and shared subjectivity. Kruks, Vintges and others also observe that 22 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , 8. Butler’s own up- take of Beauvoir is rather more labyrinthine, as I’ll discuss briefly below. 23 Moi, What is a Woman? , 5, 184. 9 Before We Said “We” advocates of post-structuralism have overstated their claim of dramatic rup- ture with everything that came before.24 These analyses confirm my view that Beauvoir not only served as a repressed source for feminist arguments of the 1970s and beyond, but can serve as a good resource for feminism today. For instance, her failure to anticipate and sub- scribe to the “identity politics” of the 1980s no longer looks like such a terrible mistake; and the lack of a clear demarcation between biologically given “sex” and socially constructed “gender” is no longer cause for derision or condescen- sion to those of us who have been convinced (by such scholars as Anne Faus- to Sterling and Judith Butler, as well as by several decades of changes to the life-world of the sex-gender system) that what we used to call “sex” is also inex- tricable from social processes. Moreover, Beauvoir’s attention to the impedi- ments to solidarity between groups of women is very much to the point. The intervening mist appears to be clearing. And yet there is still work to do. As a general reader of feminist/gender/ sexuality/cultural theory, I find it irritating that so many people—including many feminists—still cite and credit Foucault, or Bourdieu, or Lacan, or Judith Butler, for key and groundbreaking ideas (such as the social construction of gender) where they could, should, cite Beauvoir. When I tell people what I’m working on, I still encounter puzzled expressions: “but Beauvoir didn’t have anything to say about race, so what is there to discuss?” On the other hand, those who do appreciate Beauvoir have sometimes over-emphasized her kin- ship with later writers, and later strands of feminist theory or philosophy, to the point of distortion. I worry particularly about attempts to “rescue” Beauvoir by emphasizing her positive statements about “being with others,” bringing her closer to the main- stream “ethic of care” strand within American feminist philosophy, which seems to me very much at odds with what is most challenging and provocative in Beauvoir’s own thought.25 Similarly, attempts to show commonalities be- tween Beauvoir and Irigaray, and/or between Beauvoir and Kristeva, ignore real and basic disagreement about embodiment, psychoanalysis, maternity, 24 For similar arguments that the insistence on a sharp break between existentialist and “post-structuralist” French thought is not borne out by careful reading of a considerably more complex intellectual history, see Didier Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay . Fou- cault and Sartre now appear to have agreed about quite a few things (which may explain why they signed so many of the same manifestos). Perhaps Beauvoir and Butler will ap- pear to feminists in the twenty-second century, not as succeeding and oppositional “phas- es” of theory, but as overlapping interlocutors. 25 See in particular Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phe- nomenologies, Erotic Generosities , and my discussion in chapter 1 below.